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LOL, direct orders at resellers in the US is sometimes frustrating.

You are charged transportation charges to Germany that drive tears into one's eyes. Now at Corona, at least from Germany to the US they have doubled the fees and you will have to wait weeks for delivery. You are charged premium overnigth and get snail male.

I tried to order some books at us bookstores. The books were at reasonable prices but even the large book stores do not deliver to Germayn and in Germany you don't get them except a bookstore wh0 knows a way to get them through a wholesaler to Germany. Don't aks for the price. You are charged pharmacy prices. Crazy.

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I wonna bead this shoulder bag.

Flap and perhaps the strap.

Flap is a bit more than 7.9" wide and 5.9" high.
Strap is 1.96" wide and 47" long.

Thought about a star constellation for the flap. Dark blue background with white stars and single white beads as line form star to star. The idee came on a late evening seeing some stars blinking through the clouds when I was somewhere between still awake and already sleeping.

For the strap no idee yet.

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The strap is completed.

Village of seven tipi's,

Started to bead the flap.

[OLChemist]

Nice work. :)

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It feels good to be back to beading though only small time on Fridays and trying do it more slowly but with better aligned rows and collumns.

The flap will take many Fridays. Yesterday I did one and a half row of dark blue background beads.

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Made a sample card of bead colours I can get in Germany.

One bead, 93190 is 9/0, the others are either 10/0 or 11/0. 23980 black is 10/0 but looks like th eother 11/0

LOL, the Czech deliver more colours and more beads to the US than to GE. More customers in the US with need for lots of beads.

Numbers to bead colours at Crazy Crow are different by numbers in the Czech bead Crad and partially what is listed in the German online shop. I think the 9 at the end indicates size 9/0

[OLChemist]

These are the same colors I have in my beading closet. I have do have some sol gel opaque cream 11/0, which might be the 3050, and some gold and rhodium plated 13/0 cuts. I use the plated beads where other folks use the gold and silver painted; the plated hold up much better.

BA, you need to consider some transparent colors too, especially since -- no offense intended -- you're fixated on the old days. In the older glass formulations the opacifiers used were different. Some of the old formulations had deeper light penetration. Using transparent colors will give a similar look. In a lot of the older pieces, the very dark cobalt blue beads were actually transparent. Sometimes the darkest green and the deep red were too. The transparent colors have a lovely sparkle.

Using transparent colors when you're doing figurative/representational designs can give some nice effects. On a night sky, the dark transparent cobalt blue is very nice. The design elements stand out sharply against the blue, especially stars.


My antique micro beads are obviously old colors. They're Italian glass, which had a different range of colors. There was an intermediate translucent range of colors, the so called greasy colors. The colors were not reproducible.

If you start hunting down antiques you need to be aware that some glass formulations have toxic components. Lead was fairly common. Chalk white has lead. So do some greasy yellows. I don't use these tiny beads on things for kids.

Last year I bought a lot that included some transparent yellowish-green beads. When I got them, the color made me suspicious. Uranium and strontium used to be used in glass and glaze. Some of those old glasses are hot. I've had a run in with radioactive beads before. I hit these with a UV light and they fluoresced, which is a characteristic of uranium glass. I borrowed a colleague's Geiger counter and sure enough they were slightly radioactive. While the levels are low, I don't want to use them on things folks wear or handle a lot. So, I gave them to a collector of uranium glass.

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Transparent colours I can get you find here: transparent

Hunting down old italian, czech, french and german beads is a very different task.

I have been told that among the old hobbyists in Germany one might find many of old beads but I am not a memebr of their circles and may be it is good that I am not. Probably many have already sold old as they are quite old if not dead by now.